The present invention relates generally to continuous availability between sites at unlimited distances, and specifically to variable configurations for continuous availability of workloads in a multi-site environment.
Existing continuous availability and disaster recovery solutions are limited by a number of factors. Application availability protects against data loss, but is limited to a maximum amount of distance between sites. Existing solutions support a maximum distance that is considered too limited for many customer environments.
Disaster recovery solutions provide unlimited distance between sites with minimal data loss, but require starting systems, applications, and their supporting infrastructure on the backup site, which may take several hours.
Both disaster recovery and continuous availability systems additionally require modifications to software applications, such as database servers, and hardware, such as routers and switches, in order to implement the various disaster recovery and continuous availability functions, and therefore require additional cost and reconfiguration in order to implement. Existing disaster recovery and continuous availability solutions operate at a site or system level, not at a workload level. In addition, existing disaster recovery and continuous availability systems provide only a limited set of configurations for site to site availability and recovery, none of which apply to the workload.